PhD defence - Leonie Alena Saleth

The large-scale production of renewable energy infrastructure for the green transition generates new resource demands, among which balsa wood – used in wind turbine blades – stands out as a renewable material. While for some, the logging and manufacturing of the lightweight wood in Ecuador represents an opportunity for sustainable development, for others it resembles cases of green extractivism, where communities and producers in the Global South shoulder the social and ecological costs of greening industrial economies. In contrast to forms of extractivism that are enabled through displacement and enclosure, the balsa industry operates through a combination of plantations monopolised by multinational firms and salvage accumulation, where traders and Amazonian communities source the wood from fallow land and forests. These practices are characterised by mobility, informal markets, and heterogeneous arrangements of work, and produce complex ways in which resource workers manoeuvre the possibilities and constraints of operating in the niches of a global supply chain.

Based on eleven months of multi-sited ethnographic research following balsa from forests to factories, this dissertation examines how resource workers navigate the tension between autonomy and dependence under the volatile conditions of global green markets.

The first chapter examines the colonial legacies that shape the balsa industry and situates salvaging as a long-established modality of extraction which is enabled by the abundance and light weight of balsa trees.

The second chapter analyses how the 2020 balsa boom expanded salvaging practices into the Amazon rainforest, showing how communities are drawn into the lucrative but unsettling trade. It explores the challenges community members face in the attempt to benefit from the boom while sustaining communal life amid the divisive pressures of capitalist relations.

The third chapter sheds light on the ways in which balsa traders carve out informal spaces in which they seek autonomy from regulatory authorities while at the same time grappling with risks and the exposure to violence that flexible extraction can imply.

The last chapter then turns to manufacturing plants and examines how factory workers accept heteronomous structures in exchange for the promise of stable employment, which, however, is marked by fragility and uncertainty as even formal contracts bend under unpredictable global market dynamics.

By tracing the wood across the supply chain, I show how during boom-and-bust cycles, all workers operating within the balsa economy reorganise their livelihoods around flexible extraction tied to global market rhythms. On the one hand, these rhythms generate pervasive uncertainty, reconfigure social relations, disrupt communal practices and produce highly competitive conditions that can turn into conflict and violence. At the same time, salvaging balsa for a global supply chain allows workers to negotiate the terms of their involvement and to benefit from an otherwise inaccessible market. Autonomy, in this context, must be understood as always relational, as it reflects balsa workers’ capacity to shape and navigate their livelihoods within constraints that are produced by states, markets, external temporalities, and the material properties of balsa itself.

The thesis contributes to critiques of green capitalism and the political ecology of climate change mitigation by emphasising the unequal ways in which the renewable energy transition is organised and unfolds. It argues that while the energy transition is often portrayed as a smooth and linear path toward sustainability, it is based on the outsourcing of uncertainty and chronic instability to resource producers, mainly in the Global South. While forms of salvage accumulation create niches in which workers pursue autonomy as independence from employers and the state, this autonomy remains compromised by dependence on unpredictable markets and the competitive pressures of resource booms. Highlighting salvaging as a central modality of resource extraction adds analytical complexity to existing studies of green extractivism and underscores the need to understand these supply-chain niches as key arenas in which struggles over autonomy take place